05-15-2010, 11:46 AM
How to explain and account for Prime Minister Gilani’s display of unabashed public support for a discredited politician alleged to have used a fake document to establish his eligibility for contesting a seat for the National Assembly?
How to justify the prime minister’s pledging financial grants and projects while addressing a by-election public meeting in Muzaffargarh, as part of a campaign for a party candidate? Can one imagine such violation of norms and codes of conduct in India or any other civilised country?
Our suave chief executive repeatedly commits himself to accord unconditional respect to the judiciary and comply with its verdicts and, yet, he lets his law minister openly defy the court directives. Why this duplicity?
Accountability courts, “choked” and starved of funds, have been turned into a big joke - sans public prosecutors, sans staff and furniture - despite the higher court’s instructions to strengthen and expand them.
Why is it that the courts have to take notice of the government’s inefficiency, misconduct and abuse of powers and why do they have to issue corrective directives? If the prime minister himself acts in an arbitrary manner, riding roughshod on merit and rules, promoting officers out of turn or approves allotments of land in public parks disregarding court guidelines, surely the message to other ministers and civil servants would be to bypass rules of business and prescribed norms while exercising authority at their end. Why has the court to stop willy-nilly a deal involving millions in a case where time-honoured procedures were ignored with a view to favouring a particular party?
Thousands of schools in Sindh have remained closed - now for years; hundreds of them are illegally occupied by influential landlords. This was recently highlighted in a programme aired on a private television channel and confirmed by no less an authority than the education minister of the province, himself.
On the one hand, you go on adding to the misery and hardship of the people by inflicting oppressive pricing and taxation policies; while on the other hand, you spend billions in maintaining a huge Cabinet enjoying extravagant perks and high privileges, including jaunts abroad in luxury liners. You keep borrowing huge amounts from money lenders, from home and abroad, and wasting most of it, eventually throwing the burden of paying the loans back on impoverished masses and coming generations.
How to justify the prime minister’s pledging financial grants and projects while addressing a by-election public meeting in Muzaffargarh, as part of a campaign for a party candidate? Can one imagine such violation of norms and codes of conduct in India or any other civilised country?
Our suave chief executive repeatedly commits himself to accord unconditional respect to the judiciary and comply with its verdicts and, yet, he lets his law minister openly defy the court directives. Why this duplicity?
Accountability courts, “choked” and starved of funds, have been turned into a big joke - sans public prosecutors, sans staff and furniture - despite the higher court’s instructions to strengthen and expand them.
Why is it that the courts have to take notice of the government’s inefficiency, misconduct and abuse of powers and why do they have to issue corrective directives? If the prime minister himself acts in an arbitrary manner, riding roughshod on merit and rules, promoting officers out of turn or approves allotments of land in public parks disregarding court guidelines, surely the message to other ministers and civil servants would be to bypass rules of business and prescribed norms while exercising authority at their end. Why has the court to stop willy-nilly a deal involving millions in a case where time-honoured procedures were ignored with a view to favouring a particular party?
Thousands of schools in Sindh have remained closed - now for years; hundreds of them are illegally occupied by influential landlords. This was recently highlighted in a programme aired on a private television channel and confirmed by no less an authority than the education minister of the province, himself.
On the one hand, you go on adding to the misery and hardship of the people by inflicting oppressive pricing and taxation policies; while on the other hand, you spend billions in maintaining a huge Cabinet enjoying extravagant perks and high privileges, including jaunts abroad in luxury liners. You keep borrowing huge amounts from money lenders, from home and abroad, and wasting most of it, eventually throwing the burden of paying the loans back on impoverished masses and coming generations.